The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates
“Sometimes all that’s needed to lift women is to stop pulling them down”
3 Main Messages:
To find out the real issues you need to talk to people and get to know them
A backward society is one where decisions for women are being made by men
Often the surface problem is underpinned by the REAL root problem
“A report by Save the Children said a million teenage girls die or are injured in childbirth every year, which makes pregnancy the number one cause of death for teenage girls.”
This fact alone shocked me. I had no idea. Did you?
Melinda French Gates’ book is full of horrifying statistics and soul-soaring success stories of women who have flourished despite their conditions and fought to improve the lives of others. Gates names each of these people - effectively doing exactly what this book sets out to do: inform and lift others.
French Gates is famous for 2 things: her charity work and her former marriage to Bill. I admit to knowing little about her or her work before reading this book and am now in utter awe. She writes with frank honesty, sharing personal and professional stories and demonstrates great humility, wisdom and curiosity throughout.
One of my greatest takeaways from the book is that no problem is ever as simple as it first appears. In each case, French Gates was hoping to solve a problem, and then through speaking to women on the ground, she peeled back layer after layer to uncover what the real issue was before starting to try and solve it. She learned the importance of understanding generational cultural rituals, practices and beliefs and how these need to be unpicked before new thinking and understanding can emerge. As one charity worker pointed out: “Their cup is not empty; you can’t just pour your ideas into it. Their cup is already full, so you have to understand what is in their cup.” A lesson in diplomacy! Most importantly, she built relationships, asked questions and really listened to people.
Her work covers maternal and newborn health, family planning, the importance of girls’ education (see Room to Read and U-Go), the hidden data and impact of unpaid work, child marriages and women in the workplace. While referencing the impact these have in developed countries, they are a matter of life and death in Sub-Saharan Africa and part of South Asia.
The impact of unpaid work is enormous in our everyday world. Many women find that they are unable to balance managing a home, family-administration tasks alongside a full time job. There is no data on this yet but anecdotal evidence suggests that women are opting out of the workforce or reducing hours and choosing less impactful roles in order to manage. In The Moment of Lift, we learn about how laws, customs and beliefs hold women back in agriculture, school, the workplace and at home. It seems insurmountable, and yet French Gates writes about the women she met who were forward thinking, brave and effective in impacting change.
This all starts with family planning. As pointed out throughout the book and in her TED Talk, French Gates explains that all women want is “the power to plan their own lives and raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families.” In order for this to happen they need to be able to plan when and when not to have children. She continues by pointing out that “Contraceptives are the greatest life-saving, poverty ending, women empowering innovation ever created.” By limiting the number of children born, the opportunities and quality of life of the mother and her living children are greatly increased.
This book however, has lessons for us all and is a rallying call: “We women have to lift each other up - not to replace men at the top of the hierarchy, but to become partners with men in ENDING hierarchy”. French Gates is not the first to point out that “Gender equity lifts everyone” but she paints a vivid and clear picture of the impact of gender inequity and makes practical suggestions for how we can move in the right direction. Now that I am more informed, I too can start asking the right questions and help the uneducated to unfill and refill their cups in order to help make that lift, or at the very least - a little shift!
